The Displacement - Prologue

A PROLOGUE TO THE PROLOGUE

              We must begin by zooming out.

              Take a moment to think for yourself -- it won’t be long, I promise, so just take some time and do it. Think. What is the very biggest comprehensible thing that you can think of? A universe? Think again. Think bigger.

              Yes, I know you are befuddled. Something exists that is bigger than an entire universe? Well, first of all, something does. And secondly, if you are confused, I do not blame you. I myself am a bit bamboozled about the whole concept. The idea of the existence of a multiverse -- yes, a multiverse, composed of infinitely many universes -- is hard to understand, if it can be understood at all in the first place. So do not ask me, because of the fact that I am a perfect computer, to explain the true nature of the multiverse. I cannot do it any better than you. The multiverse was made to be incomprehensible, and the vast majority of its residents, in fact, prefer to disregard its existence completely. Most sentient life-forms, it seems, would much rather think that the hugely infinite universe they reside in is the largest and most infinite in the scale of things, rather than the truth, for such a concept would shock them. It's simply too complicated.

              There have been several theories to explain the existence of the multiverse through the years. The first of these to come along stated that the multiverse was just some huge disc, split up into separate universes like a pie. As simple and understandable as this explanation puts it, it is of little use to us, for as it turned out, it was factually incorrect. So, in order to replace it, along came a slew of new quantum theories, an explanation for which I will do you a favor by sparing. The makeup of the multiverse isn’t exactly a light topic for untrained minds like yours. It certainly doesn’t help, either, that there are hundreds of these supposed explanations, each one more perplexing than the last. But, in fact, the multiverse is an irrelevant topic at the moment, so let us mention no more of it. As of now, all that must truly be taken into account is a single one of the universes that make it up -- a certain three-dimensional realm that, for the sake of keeping things simple, we will refer to as Dimension Three.

              Dimension Three, as one of the surprisingly few inhabited universes, seems like it would be an interesting place. But do not allow yourself to think such things. You might go exploring in Dimension Three -- in a spaceship of some sort, let’s say -- but after a few hours of light-speed exploring, the inevitable fact would soon arise. To say Dimension Three is inhabited is something analogous to saying a single ant in a concert hall renders the place crowded -- truth be told, the vast majority of it is quite lifeless, if one doesn’t count a few star clusters where microbial life is beginning to arise. Little flourishes in Dimension Three, and what does is not the least bit enviable.

              To find anything exciting in this bleak, backwater universe takes a little extra effort. There is intelligent life, yes -- but to search it out is a fool’s errand, for it is hidden in the least likely place one could possibly fathom. Anyone searching for this mysterious species would somehow have to know to look for an inconspicuous yellow sun in the midst of a boring, lopsided, beige galaxy. This sun, simply called The Sun by the inhabitants of its system, got its name through an interesting turn of events: when the time came for the intelligent race to name it, they had no clue that anything else like it existed in their galaxy. Now, I do not mean to criticize here; indeed, this trivial error is rightly excusable. But the people never got around to changing the name after they had finally gotten the concept of other suns through their heads, and it remains to this day. There are a few dissenters, mind you; in more recent years, some have come to believe that The Sun should be renamed Sol, and to tell the truth, I myself would favor that. But since the people there aren’t too fond of big changes, the chances of this ever coming into effect are depressingly slim.

              Most of the planets in the system are bleak, lifeless rocks named after pagan deities thought up by primitives thousands of years ago. The only exception is one certain planet that happens to have an even less impressive name. By now, you should know where I’m going. If by some chance you haven’t been able to connect the dots, I will tell it to you:

              Earth.

              If the fact that their homeworld is named after dirt doesn't give this away, the people that live there aren't exactly the brightest. Most of their energy is drawn out of carbon-based rocks and sludge drawn out of the ground, the environment is hopelessly over-polluted, and world peace is still something people pray for. But perhaps their most drag-down quality of all is their complete cluelessness when it comes to the concept of alien life. They have no idea that they aren’t alone in the multiverse. The farthest they've ever gone into space is to their own moon -- think back to what they call their sun and then take a lucky guess toward what their moon is called -- which was done in a clunky hunk of metal that ran on several hundred metric tons of said carbon sludge. They have no idea that such a thing as a multiverse exists, for, believe it or not, they're still trying to get their fingers around the fact that there's even a universe.

              It has always seemed uncannily strange to me that such a bleak, miserable and generally unenviable place as your planet Earth would be the place where such a universe-changing set of events would begin -- events that would change a lot about the species inhabiting their planet named after dirt, as well as another that you’ll meet soon enough.

              They began on an amoeba-shaped island off the coast of a place called Scotland, with a baby girl who happened to share the name of said island.


PROLOGUE

                Dr. Keith Rabwather had always had a hunch that there was something special about the little, blonde-haired baby that he and his devoted team of researchers had been studying at the Isle of Skye Extraterrestrial Research Facility for the last several months. But, as he was beginning to discover, having a hunch wasn’t much good for convincing the others. As scientists often did, most of the ISERF staff wanted nothing but fact. And all the research done on the tiny girl had yielded little in the way of it. There was simply something different about the girl, and that was all about her that anyone could discern.

              Dr. Rabwather took a large bite out of the sawdusty bagel that would have to serve as his breakfast that morning, as something of the sort usually did, and then returned his gaze back through the thick glass panel that provided a view into a small padded room. Inside this room was the baby girl, sprawled on the ground and fervently working with a toy of hers; a thing which consisted of several colored beads suspended on a long, twisted metal wire. He stared intently at the little girl, watching her, as if he expected her to do something incredible on the spur of a moment -- grow wings, turn into a green monster, or spontaneously explode. However, no such things happened. Nothing ever did. The baby never did anything out of the ordinary. Her behavior showed absolutely no signs of her strange, unique condition, and that was what baffled Rabwather the most.

              For the very most part, she was… normal.

              The baby's parents had not wanted her. Born to a young couple fresh out of college and suffering through a financial crunch, there was simply no way that she could be kept. Though the original idea had been to put the child up for adoption, it was eventually decided instead that she be donated to science, so that some better use could be found for her. She had been taken promptly to the ISERF facility on the Isle of Skye, for the girl’s mother’s uncle had worked there at the time. There, it had been decided that the little girl needed a name, and it was someone’s idea to dub her after the island. Skye had seemed to stick, so it was kept.

              But life for the girl would not be so normal from that point on. First, as was essential for any test subject entering the ISERF, little Skye's genome had to be completely mapped. The process had gone swimmingly, as it often did with the facility’s state-of-the-art equipment. Things got interesting, however, when the results came back. The staff discovered something very intriguing. Something different.

              The anomaly lay in something simple -- something simple enough to speak of, at least, for in all actuality, it was positively baffling. Something about Skye’s DNA was off in a way that the world had never seen before. There seemed to be much more of it than there should have been, first off, but that was only the beginning. The rest of her genome, compared to a typical mapping, might as well have come from a frog, for how different it was. The strangest thing, however, was that none of these things seemed to affect her at all. Skye was a completely healthy girl, and she certainly didn’t look like a mutant. Yet there, as blatant as a polar bear in Grand Central Station, were her genes.

              Something about this baby was very, very wrong.

              At first, most of the staff suspected a foul-up on their machinery’s part. If that were the case, said the staff, the simple solution would be to work out the bugs and run another test. This, however, would not fly for two glaring reasons: there were no bugs to be found, and running the machine cost more money than the average working man made in a lifetime.

              Another solution never needed to be sought, however, for it was then that Keith Rabwather finally came out with his hunch. Skye’s genes, he said, were the way they were not because of any flunk-up, but simply because of nature -- natural evolution had made them this way. But why? Rabwather’s theory was something like this: the girl’s extra genes were not there for nothing, but simply not being used -- yet. They were in a way dormant, so he claimed; like a shrub in the winter. And their true nature could not be revealed until, one way or another, they were activated.

              This, of course, was the most outlandish idea that a good many of the staff had ever heard. But at the ISERF, most people were used to outlandish ideas. So it was, then, that a long, mostly fruitless period of research began on Skye, with the hopes of finding some way to activate the strange genes -- for the betterment of the world as we know it.

NOTE FOR RESEARCHERS:

For the betterment of the world as we know it was what the ISERF stated all their research was, however applicable such a phrase ever was. If the ISERF staff sat around eating bologna sandwiches for a whole day, it would be for the betterment of the world as we know it. And indeed, if you have not quite gotten it through your head by now, most of their real research was the relative quality of processed lunch meat, too.

              In her earliest years on the island, Skye was a cheery, playful little girl. She seemed to love to be active; as soon as she had learned to walk, she went straight to running. But above all else, she was happy -- just as happy as any other wide-eyed, life-loving toddler. In the confines of the ISERF facility, her life was kept as normal as such a life could possibly be. She had a normal-looking room to sleep in and a host of toys to amuse herself with. She was fed what every normal baby was fed -- sickening, greenish vegetable mishmash -- and ate it happily. And, from time to time, she was even allowed to go outside the facility and enjoy the cool Scottish sea breezes. Except for the fact that she was injected with some new strange chemical every day, her life was calm, blissful, and, over all, enjoyable.

              Things on the other side of her life, however, did not go nearly as well. For what seemed like years of research and testing, no single experiment yielded a positive result. The team tried everything, mind you; they researched every bit of advanced science that they could find and called in scores of colleagues from England, Germany, and the United States. Yet somehow, for reasons that only perplexed them more and more every day, those mysterious dormant genes only kept fighting.

              Now, knowing what I know, I can easily tell you that the main reason for that was a simple one: those scientists were attempting a task that plainly could not be done -- not by their methods, at least. But they had no idea of this. Day after day, they tried and tried, determined as fire ants. But their work was hopeless. Staff members soon began to bail from their roles for every reason they could scrounge up; that they needed more family time, or they had finally given up on this alien junk, or that it was just a damn shame in the name of science or for the betterment of the world as we know it were good enough excuses to jab needles into a baby girl. Before anyone knew it, a year had passed, and another one followed in a time that seemed even shorter. Skye had turned two years old. Soon she would be old enough to start learning how to talk, read, write, and live normally, and tantalizing as the unanswered questions were, it was against anyone’s good judgment to cut into her upbringing. Finally, a reluctant agreement was made for the project to be all but abandoned. Little Skye was set aside in waiting for a new use -- one that interfered less with the most vital stages of her life -- to be found for her.

              So it was, then, that Skye, without heavy research being conducted on her every day, began to be allowed many new things -- including more time outdoors. As her brain grew to the point where it could consciously process likes and dislikes, she soon found that she very much liked the open air and cool breezes of the outside world. In fact, she soon discovered that if she was sneaky, she could get out of her room, through the facility, and out into the world by herself, without anyone taking her there. So she began to do this on a regular basis, and if anyone ever found out about it, they didn’t seem to care. After all, there was no use for Skye anymore -- it was not as if she was still under constant supervision.

              Every time Skye snuck out, she would wander aimlessly around the near vicinity of the ISERF, for aimlessly is the only way that a two-year-old can do any sort of wandering -- even one tactful enough to escape the ISERF on a daily basis. She never found too many things of interest; only rocks, moss, and the occasional green frog, for the Isle of Skye is not known to boast too many things that small children would find interesting. But in Skye’s mind, being outside still beat being inside by a long shot. Outside, the air didn’t smell like freon, for instance, and frogs were more fun to watch than wires and beads.

              Almost another whole year went by, and business as usual went on at the ISERF. But then, one day, there happened an event that was very, very much out of the ordinary.

              It was a well-known fact at the Isle of Skye Extraterrestrial Research Facility, an organization dedicated to making contact with aliens, that anyone’s chances of ever actually doing so were as hopeless as the next man’s. Perhaps that had been why the scientists had all taken so gleefully to the new project with Skye -- at last, a break from searching the skies for UFO’s! With the project abandoned, however, they had long since gone back to their usual business of pointing antennas up into space and crossing their fingers, even as they knew full well that the chances of anything ever coming up were one million to one.

              But on that day, they won the lottery.

              It was almost high noon when it happened. Without a warning of any kind, a huge flash of light appeared over the island like a firework from hell, accompanied by a resounding boom that would have rivaled an incendiary bomb. This, of course, meant that the ping of the radar didn’t even need to be heard for the entire facility to jolt into a frenzy. Everyone knew that such a noise and such a sound could mean one of two things -- someone had fired a nuclear missile at Great Britain, or a spaceship had just come down into the atmosphere, and the last nukes had been defused in 2035. Every other sign proved them just as right; no sooner had the big boom erupted than every screen in the ISERF’s computing system began to flash with alerts and messages, proclaiming the detection of foreign substances like a digital Paul Revere. Whatever had just come into the atmosphere of the planet was made of something that wasn't on the Periodic Table.

              This, the staff knew, was the day they had all been waiting for. All signs were nothing but good. If they could find what they knew would soon be arriving, the ISERF's work would advance a huge step forward -- or possibly be complete. Either way, once the word got out that aliens had been found in Scotland, their name would be linked to it like a ball and chain around a prisoner's ankle, and that would mean that the children of the children of every ISERF scientist would never have to work a day in their lives.

              In other words, the time to act was now.

              There was something, however, that no one had accounted for. Skye -- who had been growing bolder and thus had explored a bit farther than she usually did on that day -- found the spaceship long before anyone else could. She thought nothing of it, of course; to her, the huge, steaming pile of shiny metal was simply a new playground to explore. So, without anyone around to tell her otherwise, she climbed up the heap, found an opening, and slipped inside.

              By the time the ISERF had triangulated the coordinates of the impact site, scrounged together all of its scanning devices and pictographical omni-translators, and hauled the lot of it over in every jeep they owned, they were greeted to quite the surprise: whatever had crashed on the Isle of Skye, nothing remained of it. Where it had gone was anybody’s guess; in fact, some theory would probably be out by tomorrow, explaining why it had completely disappeared from the face of the earth, leaving nothing behind but the long, deep rut it had left in the dirt -- for the betterment of the world as we know it.

              Then, however, they found Skye. She had not wandered far since finding the spaceship. But the fact that she had somehow gotten almost a quarter mile away from the facility was the least of their concerns. Far more puzzling was the pair of thick, metal bracelets that had somehow gotten strapped onto the girl’s wrists.

              Being so obviously alien, the bracelets interested the ISERF like nothing else had since Skye’s genome had first been mapped. But one thing kept the next round of long, costly research from beginning: the bracelets did not seem to do anything at all. It was true that much about them was fascinating -- they were covered in markings which glowed from time to time, seemingly at random, and they would not have come off if a chainsaw had been taken to them. But glowing, indestructible, and alien or not, anything that did nothing was not worth the ISERF’s time, so interest in Skye waned once again.

              That is, until, on Skye’s third birthday, Keith Rabwather performed a checkup on her and found something that nearly made him faint. Skye’s extra, dormant genes had been suddenly activated. And he knew exactly why. Here, sitting in front of him, was the solution his team had sought for.

              The bracelets!

              Needless to say, research commenced immediately, and for the next several weeks, the team analyzed Skye and the bracelets with a furor the likes of which they’d never had. Skye -- now three, and very precocious in the field of talking -- asked a good many questions through the whole ordeal. “Why?” she would ask every day as Dr. Rabwather sat her down in her thick metal chair and fired frequency beams at her bracelets. “What’s so special about them? What’s special about me?” And Rabwather, in the soothing tones a father uses, would always do his best to calm her down. Never, though, did he give any of the answers that she really wanted -- no mention of why she never had time to do what she wanted, or why everyone always watched her, or why she was stuck up in a science lab in the first place. Never was she allowed to speak up and tell the staff that she wanted to get out, to finally see what the rest of the world looked like. The ISERF was her prison, and there she was to stay.

              But the forces of the universe must have been lined up in Skye’s favor -- and, at the same time, inclined to play a very cruel joke. Soon enough, she would get her wish.

              There came a day when Rabwather told her that his studies on the bracelets had led to an outlandish discovery -- evidence of another dimension, a whole different universe beyond the stars. And, with special research, he had found a way to get there: naturally occurring eddies in the dimensional fabric, mysterious things that popped up in deep space. The next one would open up in exactly three months, and that was their opportunity. Then the entryway to a whole new age of scientific thought would be opened up. This would put one measly alien spacecraft to shame. A whole other universe! And better yet, he said, the ISERF had the perfect subject to send there.

              What they had not told Skye, though, was that that perfect subject was her.

              As the three months passed slowly by, Skye began to detect a very strange change in Rabwather and the staff; perhaps even, she thought, a hint of insanity. The prospect of other universes and the fame and fortune they promised seemed almost to possess them. They spent entire afternoons cheering, laughing, and popping champagne bottles in the hallways. Some days, they forgot to feed Skye. Nights, however, were the worst -- she could hear Rabwather in his quarters, laughing like a demoniac, roaring and hollering about the fourth dimension. To her three-year-old mind, it was nothing but gibberish, of course; but this kind of gibberish was an awful kind, one that got inside her and terrified her.

              Then, one morning, Rabwather and his team took Skye outside, and there was a huge jet, lying in wait like some dreadful, lurking beast. The staff told her nothing as they led her aboard, but she heard them saying over and over again that they were going to a place called Florida, where the launch would take place. They used the word launch more than Skye was comfortable with, and the more they said it, the more she worried about what it could mean. The plane ride was horrific for poor little Skye, and she spent most of it huddled in the corner of her private room with an awful feeling in her stomach. No one came to comfort her. She saw no one at all, in fact, until the plane landed and the time came to walk off onto foreign soil.

              Then, from that point on, things got only more and more terrible. It was hot in Florida, she noticed; no more was the cool, cloudy bliss she knew from her old island home. For what seemed like hours, Skye stood alone and watched as Rabwather’s staff met up with a group of American rocket scientists who cackled like villains. Then, before she could realize what was happening to her, she found herself being strapped tightly inside the belly of some streamlined, metal, monstrous thing. A heavy black device was strapped to her left arm, just above her bracelet. Then the door was slammed shut, everything went dark, and she was alone.

              The last thing Skye remembered was something coming down over her head; then she slipped into a deep sleep and forgot everything.

              And then, Skye, fast asleep inside the most advanced spacecraft ever developed by the citizens of Earth, was rocketed into space and flung into the unknown. But, as greatly as the ISERF had anticipated the results of her mission, little Skye was never heard from again. The surveying systems and monitors in the girl’s communication band had all lost contact with the Floridian base as soon as the tiny spaceship made the jump between dimensions. The mission, which had cost millions of dollars -- the last of the money that the ISERF had had -- had been a complete and total flop.

              To make matters worse, though, when the public found out about how Rabwather’s team had sent an innocent, unwilling toddler to die in the depths of space, to say the least, they were not happy. Within the next month, most of the staff had found fitting places in prison -- or, in the case of a few, including Rabwather himself -- the psychiatric ward. And, as always seems to happen on the bleak planet Earth, all evidence of the aliens vanished forever.

              But Dimension Three was far from done in its awkward relationship with its newfound friend -- Dimension Four. I can tell you, for one, that Skye would live. Her story, in fact, is only just beginning as I tell you these words. But as of now, she must be forgotten -- temporarily, at least.

              On the very same planet Earth, something much, much greater was about to begin.